Fighting Crime Costs Money

Last week, state legislators meeting in special session no doubt pleased their constituents by pouring an additional $4 million into the front-end of the criminal-justice system.

They agreed on an anti-crime package that included $3 million for additional police, judges, prosecutors and public defenders to combat gang violence, and $1 million for youth programs.

They also increased maximum prison sentences for certain violent gun crimes and decided that courts should treat 14- and 15-year-olds as adults if they commit a serious crime with a gun.

It was an auspicious moment to get tough on crime. Last week, about the same time lawmakers were deliberating, Hartford recorded its 28th and 29th homicides of the year. Wednesday, federal prosecutors said they obtained new racketeering indictments against 23 members of the Latin Kings gang in New Haven and Bridgeport as part of an ongoing campaign against the gangs. Thursday, Hartford police continued their crackdown on drug trafficking by arresting more than a dozen people trying to buy drugs from undercover agents at the Stowe Village public housing project, the same place they rounded up 14 reputed drug dealers belonging to the 20 Love gang the week before.

All the activity showed that crime is too prevalent in Connecticut's cities, and that the authorities intend to arrest more criminals and put them in prison with longer sentences. A crime-weary public will have no problem with that.

But there was another event last week -- a riot that took the lives of two inmates at the Carl Robinson Correctional Institution in Enfield -- that reminded policy-makers and the public that they can't forget about the back end of the criminal-justice system.

Dozens of inmates became violent in a dormitory-style facility that is unsuited to hold violent people. An estimated 50 of those involved in the riot have already been shipped to higher-security prisons, but there isn't much room left. The state's correction system has been hovering around 110 percent of capacity. Another three institutions will open within the next 10 or 12 months -- a 300-bed super-maximum-security facility in Somers, a 700-bed high-security prison in Montville and a 550-bed facility for women in the Niantic section of East Lyme. But after that, no new prisons are planned, designed or funded.

And that presents a problem. The Connecticut correction system has gained 2,000 inmates in the past 12 months, many of them because of the end of the supervised-home-release program. The public and politicians did not want to see convicted felons serving time outside prison walls. Before that, the rate of growth in the system had been about 1,000 inmates a year.

Such a growth rate could overwhelm the available space after the last three prisons are opened -- especially if tough- on-crime measures result in more convictions and longer sentences.

That's a sobering thought, considering that Connecticut has built 11 new institutions with 9,000 new beds at a cost of $960 million un- der a prison-construction program that began in 1985.

Alternative sentencing in which nonviolent offenders are not incarcerated may be necessary. So may a new round of construction, but not the cheaper, faster-to-build and dangerous dormitory prisons. A public that understandably wants to get tough on crime also must be prepared to pay the bill.